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Filmmaker Is Snarled in Legal Web

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 17 - Nick Cassavetes is loath to label his new movie -- "Alpha Dog," about a group of suburban, teenage gangster wannabes who corner themselves into committing cold-blooded murder -- a mere cautionary tale about wayward youth and missing-in-action parents.

At the very least, though, it's a cautionary tale for writer-directors thinking of tackling a breaking news story as their next subject.

When he set out to chronicle the life and alleged crimes of Jesse James Hollywood, a San Fernando Valley man who prosecutors say kidnapped and ordered the execution of Nicholas Markowitz, 15, in 2000, Mr. Cassavetes had reason to think he was on stable ground. Four of the five men indicted were behind bars. Mr. Hollywood, on the lam, had eluded the best efforts of the F.B.I. and the television show "America's Most Wanted" and seemed gone for good.

But with half of his movie filmed and already millions of dollars over his starting budget of $9 million, it was with a little chagrin, much shock and mixed feelings for the many people he had interviewed along the way -- perpetrators, witnesses and victims -- that Mr. Cassavetes turned on the news last March to see that Mr. Hollywood, then 25, had been arrested in Brazil and would be coming home to stand trial in Santa Barbara.

The easy, if costly, part of what came next was revising his movie, which stars Bruce Willis, Justin Timberlake and Sharon Stone: Mr. Cassavetes tossed several days' and about $500,000 worth of film, and added some more, to tailor his thinly veiled story -- about a tough-talking marijuana dealer named Johnny Truelove, played by Emile Hirsch -- to the newly changing facts.

But what has given new meaning to post-production snags has been Mr. Cassavetes's continued entanglement in the legal battle being fought by Mr. Hollywood's very real-life prosecutor, Ron Zonen, and defense lawyer, James Blatt. Last summer, he was subpoenaed when Mr. Blatt accused Mr. Zonen of misconduct and sought unsuccessfully to have him removed from the case for cooperating with Mr. Cassavetes and giving him access to nonpublic records. In November, a judge ordered Mr. Cassavetes's researcher, Michael Mehas, who is writing a book on the case, to turn over notes and tapes from his interviews to the defense. And Mr. Blatt is now threatening to seek an injunction against the release of Mr. Cassavetes's movie -- which is to have its premiere on Jan. 27 at the Sundance Film Festival and is set for release by New Line -- lest every potential jury member go see it and be tainted.

Mr. Cassavetes said he was not worried. "I don't believe he has the power to enjoin a movie, if he wanted to," he said of Mr. Blatt. He also said he had been subpoenaed again recently, and "I'll cooperate as much as my memory allows."

Mr. Cassavetes's recall may waver, but his command of the facts of the Hollywood case, as evidenced in "Alpha Dog," was prodigious. While the names and places have been changed -- to satisfy the providers of errors and omissions insurance, he said -- the movie amounts to Mr. Cassavetes's voluminously documented and carefully weighed best guess of what happened when Mr. Hollywood and his pals grabbed Mr. Markowitz, the younger brother of a rival drug dealer who owed him $1,200. His body was found six days later in a shallow grave.

"It's almost hard to believe this story, and I was determined to get to the bottom of it, which I'm not sure I ever did," he said in an interview.

Mr. Cassavetes, 46, said his eldest daughter, then a student at a high school that Mr. Hollywood had once attended, turned him on to the story of the young fugitive, a cult hero to teenagers in the valley. Mr. Cassevetes, the son of the late director John Cassavetes, said he saw reminders of his own youth: he had been kicked out of three high schools -- "for fighting, every day" -- and he recalled "thinking I was a tough guy just because I decided to be one."

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"I saw that these kids had done the same thing, and I saw where it led," he said. "This kid who was the triggerman, Ryan Hoyt, never had so much as a ticket before. He went right from a clean record -- though he wasn't a model citizen -- to death row at San Quentin." Mr. Cassavetes said he was struck by, and reminded of, the "affectation" of toughness, and how that kind of posturing can seem to box someone into behaving that way. "We watch violent images on TV, we revere violence, but we're not raised violently," he said. "And when we're put in a situation, we act how we think we should act, as opposed to how we've been trained to or how we have a history of acting."

In the course of his research, Mr. Cassavetes gained the trust of Mr. Hollywood's father, Jack Hollywood, a convicted drug dealer in his own right who is now serving a prison sentence in Arizona. "I found out from Jack lots of stuff that no one on the planet knows except for me," he said, though he said the fugitive son's whereabouts was not something he was told or asked about. "I did not want to know that, because I didn't want to be part of a criminal investigation," he said.

So what secrets had he learned? "Hypothetically, if this were true, and I'm not saying that it is, I might've talked about how he got his kid out of the country, the processes of doing that. Hypothetically, I might have talked about what happened when he got out of the country and how he got to the different place than he was before. How drug operations might have gone, what the situation was with Jesse, how things worked."

Mr. Cassavetes also said he learned from Jack Hollywood the inside story of how Jesse was captured -- a version that until now has not been published, and that did not make it into his film. "I know what happened," he said coyly. "I just don't know if I can tell you."

Then he decided to share. "This is what I believe happened," he said. "There was a family member that, by coincidence, was going to Brazil for a vacation. Jack heard about it and went, 'What?' He doesn't want anybody in the family going down to Brazil, because -- this would assume that he knows, and I'm not sure that he knew where his son was, so disclaimer-disclaimer-disclaimer -- tough position to be in, because nobody knows, and you can't stop the relative, and he can't tell the relative. But apparently that conversation might have happened.

"The person went down; soon as she stepped off the plane she got grabbed by Interpol; she got sweated till she gave up the phone number," Mr. Cassavetes said. "Clearly a dumb move. I believe it went like, 'If you're down there for a few months and everything looks good, check on him.' Interpol impersonates her voice, and it's done. Imagine the amount of guilt if you'd made a dumb move like that."

While he juggles promoting his movie and responding to subpoenas, Mr. Cassavetes is working on a new screenplay, adapting the novel "God Is a Bullet" by Boston Teran. It's the story, set in Southern California, of a father who descends into a murderous, raping, drug-dealing cult to rescue his kidnapped teenage daughter.

It is no great leap of logic to suggest that Mr. Cassavetes may be drawing from the same well as he did with "Alpha Dog."

"I'm guilty of it -- of being too busy with your everyday life to properly spend enough time with your children to figure out what's going on with them," he said. "You can check in, and you say, 'Are you all right?' But it's not like being on a farm or spending a lot of time in the house. We all live really global, Internetty lives. Kids have more power than they did before. They have cars, they can get around, they have dough, and there's always some person that's got something going on that can get everybody killed."